Future Here Now: No More Stakeholders
This piece is part of a subscriber-only series I produce called Future Here Now. This newsletter focuses on the early indicators of how the future that is unfolding now will demand very different mindsets, values and skills — from us, from our organizations and from our communities. If you like this, you will get a lot out of that. Learn more here.
It should be no secret to you that I don’t agree with how most governments and organizations deal with the public — I quit doing public engagement projects nearly 10 years ago because I didn’t want to be complicit in giving lip service to communities that opposed projects that would directly affect them.
I think a lot of my concerns can be wrapped up in the word that we use to identify that portion of the public that we think will care about what we’re doing:
Stakeholder.
Take a step back and look at that word for a moment.
Stake: a thing stuck into something else. A marker or handle. Something that asserts a kind of posession of or dominance over the thing that it is stuck in.
Holder: the person who has possession of the stake.
I am fully in favor of people having ownership over their situation, but when we think of people as stakeholders, we’re giving them too small of a role. We are reducing them to posessors, gate-keepers. And as the assumptions behind that world percolate through the ways we interact with them, our defining of them as stakeholders forces them into a defensive position. They are defined, and have little choice but to react, as people responsible for protecting their status quo from some invader. We don’t intend for the process to be confrontational, but we are baking in the assumption that their purpose is to defend what they have, how they have it today.
Because of how we have framed the situation in identifying them as stakeholders, we have laid the groundwork for opposition, conflict, resistance, rejection. And if we manage to push what we want through by force or money or power, we have poisoned the water — for ourselves and everyone who comes after us. The likelihood that future developers or planners or elected officials or business representatives will get anything other than opporsition, conflice, resistance and rejection goes down exponentially.
We’ve been doing this for 70 or 100 or 150 years, depending on your type of work. But the result is the same. Constructive engagement gets harder and harder, and people who have been screwed before solidify into implacable Stake Holders.
Not only does this make the whole situation more miserable than it ought to be, but it slashes our ability to find new solutions, solutions that fit our current and future challenges better than the old stuff we keep falling back to. Our current methods for building, and city-building, and community-building, and business-building, are riddled with structural failures — from materials that will fail in the not too distant future, to public infrastructure that we can’t sustain and competitive advantages we can’t defend, to distrust and dysfunction and wasted effort across the whole spectrum of places and organizations, public and private.
In a moment of massive transition, of epochal change, we don’t need holders of old stakes. We need collaborators, new insight providers, solution co-creators.
The rest of this week we will talk about how we get there. Follow along at http://wiseeconomy.substack.com
